WarGame: AirLand Battle Review

War, war never ch- oh look, Jets

To be honest, not a hell of a lot has changed with Wargame: Airland Battle since our extensive hands-on session over a month ago. There has been a few tweaks and balance updates, bugs squashed here and there, and the various systems the game offers have been tied together more fully. By and large though, the game still plays the same – very well, a lot like European Escalation, naturally, but the changes have a real and significant impact – and it still has the same problems we highlighted at the preview stage.

Jets, while a game-changer, are a little over-powered at the moment (and some nation’s AA severely under-powered), and they render helicopters pretty obsolete, except that there are helicopters still in the game, and typically the jet AA isn’t as good against helicopters so you have to bring in some helicopter AA... in my opinion, it’s one element of micro-management too far, but that’s just me. Infantry, even though they’ve gone through some excellent changes and are made more relevant, could also be able to give as good as they get a bit more, I feel. Again, that’s a personal thing though.

It's a shame the game can’t represent the ‘human’ element when it comes to fighting over cities and towns

On the bright side, you don’t have to unlock units using command stars anymore, but the game does really favour national and doctrine focused decks, yet the choice with said decks isn’t great at the moment. On the gameplay side of things though, everything is as good as it could be – the new engine makes the game look gorgeous, and the ability to render vertically now just brings the environments alive. The maps are also really diverse and interesting now, with a lot of tactical challenges and opportunities.

To break this down even further, here’s what you can expect from the game if you buy it: Five Tutorial missions, four campaign set-ups and a skirmish mode on the Solo side. On the online side, you can play any of the four campaign set-ups online against another person, so competitive 1vs1. You can also play the regular matches, and the special, absolutely crazy 10 vs. 10 mode, if your internet can handle it. There are three game modes, around 12 maps, and you can have Nato vs PACT or PACT vs PACT (or NATO vs NATO) confrontations. There’s also the deck creation interface. You don’t have to sign-in to your user account to play solo, but you do have to sign-in and be online for multiplayer, obviously.

The campaign map – very pretty, very dynamic... reminds me a lot of Close Combat

The thing you’ve probably all been waiting to hear about though (assuming you haven’t played the game already), is the dynamic campaign mode. In a word – it’s pretty good, but the most exciting thing about it has to be its potential. At the moment, the campaign is centred on the Scandinavian peninsular, and even then it’s not all there. Even so, there are plenty of individual zones for players to fight the opposing AI over, stretching from Denmark and Copenhagen, all the way up to the northern most reaches of Sweden and Norway, stopping just before the land starts bending round to join up with Finland and Russia. Looking at the UI, it’s clear that it wouldn’t be that hard for the team to add-in/focus the campaign map on other areas of Europe, either.

The campaign is turn-based, and there are four variations, each providing a different set-up. Two campaigns have you playing as NATO, and two as the PACT, and each one focuses on a different area of Scandinavia, with differing objectives, with the hardest one acting like a ‘Grand’ Campaign that lets you fight over the whole space. Every turn, you get a certain amount of ‘political points’ that is generated by the territories you own, as well as randomised special events. These points can either be spent on mobilising additional armies (which all have pre-set unit composition), or by using various ‘Strike’ actions that may be available to you – Naval or Air Bombardments, Commando Raids... you also have a handful of free actions, like Recon and Air Cover, that can get replenished through special events. The events system really is a nice touch, as it adds in outside factors to what is essentially a very specific scenario and it keeps things interesting.

The deck creation system has been made more interactive, with clearer and easier to digest information on units (they hope)

If we had any criticism to levy about the campaign mode specifically at this point, it’s that the system doesn’t really handle the presence of multiple armies that well. At the moment, armies have to fight each other on a 1-to-1 basis, however if you start piling in multiple armies (for example, I had three armies defending Copenhagen against a singular attacking PACT army), you then have to fight a series of battles in the same place, with each army fighting each other. This can get repetitive even within a single turn, but if you’re unable to attain victory (and it gets harder the longer a fight drags on), imagine having to fight the same series of battles every turn. There also needs to be a bit more balancing over the points and what you can spend them on – most of the ‘decent armies require a large point spend to mobilise, which can take several turns to save up for. Also, it’s not immediately obvious, but your progress through a campaign is saved – every turn the game is auto-saved, and if you go into the Solo > Campaign menu, you’ll see a button for saved games, and they’ll be there. We got caught out at first, as we couldn’t see any obvious way to save your progress if you didn’t want to do the campaign all in one go, but don’t worry, it’s there.

Wargame: AirLand Battle’s biggest challenge though would be the justification of a brand-new title so soon after the last one’s release. To be fair to Eugene, they’ve supported European Escalation fantastically over the past year, and there’s no reason to doubt they’ll do the same for AirLand Battle – in both cases, I think gamers will have gotten their money’s worth, but we can see how having to fork out so soon for another game could be a stick in somebody’s throat – this isn’t Call of Duty, after all. It’s a shame that Focus haven’t done more to ease people wanting to jump in to AirLand Battle who’ve bought the original game, but in all honesty this is worth the money, even if Focus don’t follow the same DLC plan they did before. Wargame: AirLand Battle is out now for PC.

WARGAME: AIRLAND BATTLE VERDICT

Wargame: AirLand Battle’s biggest challenge though would be the justification of a brand-new title so soon after the last one’s release. To be fair to Eugene, they’ve supported European Escalation fantastically over the past year, and there’s no reason to doubt they’ll do the same for AirLand Battle – in both cases, I think gamers will have gotten their money’s worth, but we can see how having to fork out so soon for another game could be a stick in somebody’s throat – this isn’t Call of Duty, after all. It’s a shame that Focus haven’t done more to ease people wanting to jump in to AirLand Battle who’ve bought the original game, but in all honesty this is worth the money, even if Focus don’t follow the same DLC plan they did before. Wargame: AirLand Battle is out now for PC.

TOP GAME MOMENT

Infantry now have a lot more use, and you can have some pretty epic standoffs with garrisoned infantry.